#at some point i will probably commit to retagging stuff with the new name i decided on for hravahin because i really like it and im at this

[mossiestpiglet]

One of my favorite parts of having an oc for something is how, given enough time, more ocs will start to spawn around them in order to fill in narrative gaps and then you ALSO are obsessed with those characters too

[skruffie]

Back in December, I wrote a post on facebook to try to reflect everything that I do at my job, and I’m reposting it here with some current updates because I still think about this sometimes. Putting it under a cut for length. I’m including a few edits to reflect changes that happened between when I first wrote it and now.

I was joking how if I wanted to update my resume to reflect everything I actually do at work, I would need a whole separate page just for Target. Tonight (Dec 9th 2016), I sat down and actually made an extensive list of everything that I do just to see how much it actually is, and this is what I came up with. Obligatory disclaimer: opinions are my own, yadda yadda. Don't necessarily mistake this post for complaining. Obviously it's not always a fun job, but there are a lot of aspects to these things that I enjoy doing.

DAILY TASKS Refunds: use receipt, use debit or credit card, gift card lookup, registry lookup, (rarely) check lookup, no-receipt returns with photo ID. Ranges from just a couple seconds to several minutes depending on how many items, if it's a same day return, if receipt lookup is working correctly, if it's a legit return (I lost count of how many times I've had to explain and re-explain to people committing return fraud what our return policy is, why they don't get cash back, etc).

Fraudulent refunds: Good fucking god. Basically almost the same as above except you see the same patterns of merchandise over and over, and you can never anticipate how they’ll react if the computer rejects their ID.

Exchanges: One of the easiest tasks, unless a different brand/price point is selected for exchange.

Backup cashier: Guests often sent to the desk when front lanes are occupied. Ranges between just a minute to several long transactions due to amount of items and the finite amount of desk space. Only one bag set per register, and one register doesn't even have bags. See also: guests asking if they could be rung up at the desk, or TM offering to ring guest up if things are slow.

Defectives: Process and sort defectives correctly. This regularly involves chemical items, broken glass, leaking food items, dumping alcohol (21+ only), getting everything bagged/repackaged/taped together enough and sorted into correct bins for shipment. Inspecting food merchandise to see if it's able to be donated. Bagging and sealing all chemical products. Applying labels to everything. Sorting everything onto the correct pallets at the end of the shift: defective salvage on one, CRC (usually high-end electronics, baby formula, certain clothing brands) sorted onto another. The CRC list must be checkmarked to make sure every item on the list is present and accounted for. Sort all the defective vendor items into their correct locations so vendors could bring them back. Putting defective merchandise on the pallets requires an LOD to come unlock the pallets in the first place, which pulls them from their own large task list.

Equipment tracking: keep equipment cabinet locked, unlock it/hand over keys for TMs needing walkie talkies and other things, make sure all equipment is signed out and signed back in, double-check to make sure everything is put on chargers correctly so no batteries run low, retrieve keys from the keybox for TMs April 2017: We kind of stopped doing this and the desk keys broke a while back. Replacements still haven’t arrived. We have to call the boss now to get the keybox open.

Sorting: putting out of area items back in the correct carts bins so sales floor TMs could retrieve it later, create overflow carts when the actual ones become too full, inform sales floor when carts are full, sort reshop carts from front lanes and from sales floor TMs who are about to hit compliance or go clock out, gathering all the crap that's left in reshop carts that shouldn't be there and putting it somewhere--fixtures (that belong all the way in the back, in the fixture room and not at the service desk), old sale signs (trash), actual trash, water bottles/cups, essentially stuff that should be done by the TM that brought it up in the first place but don't (2017: Some changes to this process occurred and it was made much worse than it was)

Correcting common mistakes: price challenges, price adjustments, missed cartwheel (either void the payment and apply cartwheel all at once, or manually enter it in one by one as price adjustments), missed gift receipts including those from gift registries

Guest assistance: Looking items up, giving directions through the store, calling other stores to check on inventory of items, answering questions, listening to complaints--this one ranges from sincere, actual concerns to the bizarre ("This place was a lot better off when it was just an empty lot for the plant farm!" "...Well okay sir, I guess that's that then."), more intensive emotional labor such as dealing with hostile guests, de-escalating situations so guests don't get angrier, keeping eyes on suspicious guests, working with AP when something fishy is happening, teaching guests how to use the motorized carts, signing guests up for redcards, helping guests call the redcard hotline when something's wrong with their card, calling target.com when they fuck something up with a guest's order (happens way more often than you think, and in more interesting and creative ways each time!!), honestly there is probably even more but that's what I got just off the top of my head

Communication: calling TMs on sales floor to find items, bring items, backup calls (if they are guest service trained), describing items, basically any kind of communication skill could be listed here

Order pickup: find guests' order by last name on the order list. Find guest's order by middle name on the list if their last name is not present. Look under "G" for "guest" if their name isn't on the list at all. Find order by order number if their name is not on the list. Find item in hold location (lately, like this holiday season, someone has been scanning items into one hold location and putting it in an entirely different one, so that adds to the fun!) and retrieve it or call for someone to retrieve it if it's in the back, process payment, curse the gods when the guest wants to return it that same day because the receipt information doesn't update for 24 hours after the order processes... APRIL 2017: We now have to keep the order sticker and put it in our brand new log book, including the date and time at which the payment for the order was processed, because other stores keep forgetting to train their GSTMs to push the fucking payment button.

Redcard: "And are you saving 5% with your Target Redcard? Do you want to sign up? It's 5% off nearly everything in the store and at target.com, plus free standard shipping year round and an extra 30 days on your returns. Credit or debit? Do you have a check? Do you know your account number and routing number? Gross annual income means what you make yearly" and so forth. plus, take payments for credit redcards, tell people we can't look up their credit balances, etc

APRIL 2017Sales report: Pull up how much we are making per hour in sales, compare it to the projection in what we should be making in sales, and announce it every single hour on the walkie so the LOD knows. Fake some enthusiasm for the redcard if you can.

APRIL 2017 Greeting guests: The latest direction that corporation wants to take the service desk in is creating a “hotel lobby” experience for guests when they enter the store. What this means is that they took away the method we used for processing reshop to make the desk area more sterile, and service desk TMs are expected to stand at the front of the store with the weekly ad and greet guests as soon as they walk in to try to upsell the sales, redcard, cartwheel, etc. This was implemented probably a couple months ago and I tried to do it once. It’s literally the most useless idea I’ve ever heard, because actual hotel lobby employees don’t harass you as soon as you come inside, and also because I could instead be doing one of the million other things on this list.

NEAR-DAILY/REGULARLY EXPECTED TASKS/THINGS THAT SHOULD BE DAILY Paid and left merchandise: document date+location, log it in the paid and left log including date/time/location/item description/amount that items ring up as. Defect out perishable food items. Ring out paid and left total to guests who bring receipt back for lost items.

Lost and found: log valuable items and money in lost and found log. Keep track of lost items (valuables in the locked drawer, common articles in the bin)

Bullseye's Playground: sort reshop for BP, put it away in either the correct spot or in the same price point with similar items. If it's especially slow, zone it and make it look pretty. This task becomes impossible to finish during the holiday season.

RFID: Retag clothes and domestics items that are missing barcodes and encode with RFID labels. This involves one mydevice, rolls of the correct labels (stick A is for domestics, sticker B is for clothes, and sticker C is if either label won't fit on the product tag), and one Zebra scanner. Turn bluetooth on, try to get the mydevice and zebra to read each other, turn all equipment back off and on again until bluetooth works, scan UPC, scan RFID sticker, apply sticker. If RFID sticker doesn't encode, it's gotta be tossed. These rolls are about $250 a roll and once I went through six stickers in a row before I got one to finally scan correctly. It's a gamble, but this can be done quickly if all the equipment is working correctly.

Phones: be the phone operator for a few minutes! Answer the same questions over and over, transfer calls to the right department, park calls on the hold line (for some reason I often have calls drop entirely when I try to park from the guest service phone?), do all this while trying to do any number of the previous tasks above. Multitasking! Don't you wish you had more than two arms? First time I was phone operator while the fitting room was on break was with absolutely zero training on how to ues the phone, transfer calls, all that good stuff, and I had a minor emotional breakdown when the phone wouldn't stop ringing and my line was stretching like four+ guests back, and nobody was responding to my backup calls. Those were the days.

SEMI-REGULAR TASKS Wrapping the defective pallets: Wrap and store the defective pallet when it's full. Also a gamble depending on how much room there is back at the receiving desk. Pallet is wrapped by hand with a giant roll of plastic wrap, not one of those fancy automatic machines! Easier task for normal-sized people,  but a bit time-consuming for tiny people like me who are not very physically strong and also terrible at maneuvering a big heavy pallet around on a pallet jack. It's gotten a bit easier with time though.

Gift registry: Helping people sign up for registries, helping people find registries, troubleshooting when registry ipads crash, explainig how the scanner works

Training receipts: When AP makes a recovery on items that were probably about to be stolen and they need a total amount of the value of the items. Putting the register in training mode requires GSA-level or higher TMs to change the register mode. Sorting all the reshop once training receipts are done.

Repackage: Refold blankets, curtains, and other items to make it look as nice as possible and/or to fit them back into the original packaging. Repacking non-defective items that have come loose from packaging. Discounting items if the repackage isn't as good as it could be but not bad enough to be defected out. Could be more difficult than it sounds due to lack of proper space to refold larger items and/or if the items don't have creased fold lines to make it easier.

Kodak: Fuck this machine, seriously. Keep Kodak photo printing machine in order, even though it was made in 2006 (IT HAS A FLOPPY DISK DRIVE, I’M NOT EVEN FUCKING JOKING) and is horrendously outdated and keeps thinking it's out of ink ribbon when it isn't. Replace ink, replace paper (there are two printers inside, and they both use slightly different-sized ink rolls and paper rolls, so this also requires keeping track of the boxes of rolls and ink to make sure you've got the right sizes). Previously: be on the phone with Kodak for ages and crawl around on top of/behind the machine to try to unplug cords and read tiny serial numbers out for the hapless Kodak representative that's just trying to help. APRIL 2017: it’s been working for the last few weeks, so fingers crossed it can hang in there a bit longer.

Saturdays: Take down the old sales ad and replace it with the new one. Menial easy, and sometimes shuffled off to the sunday opener if saturday's closer runs out of time.

Overhead announcements: paging guests, paging guests when they leave their car lights on, closing announcements (closing shifts only)

Ship-to-store: UPS dropping packages off at the service desk means those ship-to-store items are processed by guest service, not by backroom TMs. You will need a PDA! Open right app, scan packing slip, scan item, scan location barcode, put in location, repeat until all items from the order are processed, apply order labels to items if they print out*, close out receipt

Troubleshooting: fix label printers when they stop printing, try to answer calls about target.com when it stops working, teach other TMs how to do tasks like where the Sort Stuff button is, how to print labels, how to defect, etc

EMOTIONAL LABOR Reemphasizing this one because it's an understated and taxing task to undertake. Listen to guest complaints and comments, de-escalate guest anger, often become target for guest anger, have policy requirements and changes happen regularly to make things flexible for each guest, maintain a calm and pleasant demeanor the entire time, use of personal judgement and flexibility in each situation to make the outcome right every time, adjust to changes made by management (happens more often than you think!), watch suspicious guests, know that the fraudulent returns are probably going toward unsavory habits like drugs, knowing when merchandise is stolen and not being able to do anything about it, often being witness when guests are in the middle of a personal crisis in their lives.

April 2017: There is a lot that goes into this job. It’s hard. The way that the actual aspects of the job are easy because it’s just pushing buttons, but then things start to stack on top of one another. During Christmas, it’s a fucking nightmare. Last year, there were several days where I would have 9+ carts of unsorted merchandise crowded around my desk. The other TMs and I often stayed later to create more individual overflow carts to try to get the reshop organized, sometimes having 3 or 4 carts JUST for toys, 3 JUST for clothes, and so forth.

With the “hotel lobby” experience, we no longer have the default carts. Instead we have bins that hold about 1/4 of the reshop that carts can, and we condensed the bins down. Guests admire how clean it looks, and all I can think about how is how impossible this system will work when it gets past spring and summer. It’s just slow enough now for it to be okay but it is not a sustainable system for the holidays, no matter how many new people they hire.